“How’s the water?” Aldine called to her. She had that curious detachment that comes of not taking a thing seriously that she did not feel deeply herself. It was like when a boy said he was mad for you and you just felt impatient. His love could not be deep or real if you felt nothing at all.
They’d been to this spot with their father loads of times before he died. Wild swans floated out to sea and collected in a white wedge on what was, in summer, a beautiful cream-blue stretch of tide. On sunny days, the river glittered and the willow trees trailed their leaves in the shallows, all of it sparkling and benign. Today the clouds were particulate and unyielding, the air dreary white, and not even the ducks seemed to enjoy the water.
Lance waded in after Cooper and Leenie.
“It’s positively Baltic!” Leenie squealed, lagging behind Cooper now, hanging back as the current soaked her thighs.
“Remember those hounds?” Aldine called.
Leenie barely nodded, but Aldine knew she did. It was something they’d recalled for each other every time their father brought them here, which was more often after their mother died. They used to eat vanilla tablet with him on the ruined stone wall, where you could see both the start of the ocean and the end of the river. He would sit without talking, which meant he was thinking about their mother, so they would go off and try to find fairy circles, a ring of wild mushrooms you could stand within to make a wish. They were still searching the time the red-eared man had come to the riverbank with a pair of big-eyed, long-nosed, jittery dogs. Knotted ropes noosed the dogs’ necks, and the man held tightly to the dogs when he plunged into the water. The dogs reared like horses, but the man kept plunging, walking in circles waist-deep. The dogs kept their heads above the surface, twisting and lurching, always trying to find a means of escape from the cold and the rope, but this only forced them to swim like helpless motors beside the man, and this came to seem like the point.
“That’s horrid!” Aldine said, not even bothering to lower her voice, and Leenie asked (more quietly) their father to save the dogs, but he just stayed on the rock wall and said, “They’re racing hounds. He’s training them up.”
Aldine hoped one of the wild swans would fly up and beat the man on his big red ears, but nothing happened. After the dogs did their exercising, they were led, sopping and cold, to the riverbank, and the man walked them out of sight.
Aldine wished it were sunny, or at least one of those tormented afternoons when silvery clouds broke apart for dazzling sunshine in between the bursts of rain, but no. Aldine felt—she couldn’t help it—that Leenie was letting herself be one of those trained dogs because she was in love with Elder Cooper. To the north, the beach curved like a shorn hoof for two or three miles, not a soul out for a walk or a swim. Leenie stood up to her waist in the river, and she waved nervously to Aldine, who waved back, and Aldine wondered if it was true that the dead hovered nearby, watching. Maybe their father was watching the missionaries from the stone wall, and watching Aldine, too. “Stay by her,” he’d said. “You’re the youngest but you have the older nature.”
In the river, Elder Cooper lifted his right arm. He was wearing a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and underneath the dress shirt was a white undershirt, soaked through, and underneath that, a not unaffecting physique. He held his arm stiffly up and bent at the elbow, like someone about to say, I do solemnly swear. “Eileen Rose McKenna,” he said. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
Leenie willingly buckled, as though to drown. For a second, she was a pale riven shape under the water. Then he rescued her and she stood again, the River Doon running off her face and hair. She sputtered and smiled at Elder Cooper, and then at Aldine.
“You now, Deenie?” Leenie said, wading out, already close enough to tug on Aldine’s wrist.
“Can’t,” Aldine said. “I’m wearing black.”
“It’s not that important what you wear,” Elder Cooper said.
“Maybe another day,” Aldine said. “When it’s hot out.”
After Leenie left to marry Will, Aldine sometimes dreamed that she was in the river, slipping on the stones that lay on the bottom as she trudged out to be baptized. In the dream, it was Elder Lance who held Aldine and raised his right arm, and the cold sank into her bones as though the water were running through and not around her body. Elder Lance held out his wet, freckled arm to steady her, but when he ducked her under, he held her there and she struggled like the greyhounds until she thought she would drown, her eyes open the whole time and searching everywhere for Leenie and Will but not finding them, or her father, either, and then she was awake, and she was alone in the rose-papered room at the top of Aunt Sedgewick’s silent house.
5
Come live with us, Leenie wrote. There’s a box factory that’s owned by a member and you could get a better job than working for Old Malleyman, who can’t be long for this world anyway to hear Aunt Sedge go on about him. I feel sure that your Japanese man is around here somewhere!
Dr. O’Malley was housebound now. Aunt Sedge said he should have a proper nurse, not a young unmarried secretary who’d already stirred up talk.
“I counted up my savings,” Aldine finally told her aunt. “With what Leenie says she’ll send I have just enough for a third-class ticket.”
It was not true. Leenie had no money to send. But Aldine had obtained the money another way.
“Oh, Aldine,” Aunt Sedgewick said. She smoothed the cushion beside her with a small wrinkled hand. It was a sunny day, perfect for going out, but there they sat. “Living with a married couple so far from home,” Sedgewick added. “It won’t suit you.”
“I want to go,” Aldine said.
“There’s someone here for you, dear. He’ll come along.”
Aldine had never asked Aunt Sedgewick about the Japanese man. “It isn’t that,” she said. After a long time she added, “I’ll miss you mind and body.”
Aunt Sedgewick nodded once and seemed about to speak, but her eyes were full of tears, and she stayed on the sofa in the sunny room until Aldine kissed her on the cheek and went out, trying very hard to keep her shoes from making any noise as she opened the front door and closed it behind her.
6